Part 3 (2/2)

'Oh for G.o.d's sake,' she said out loud, to herself, her hand reaching for the film container before his could to put it back, her fingers closing around the curved matt metal as darkness imploded blindly in her and her mind groped through an abyss more dismal than she could have imagined possible.

She had been right about one thing, she thought now, remembering. She had been right not to let him bring the film can to her home. She did not honestly know how he could bear to have that object remain there in his. Then again, he did not possess what was widely regarded as her gift but she now knew without question to be more in the nature of a curse. He could live with the film can under his roof and it would give him no great cause for concern.

Or would it? Alice s.h.i.+vered, though the day was bright outside and the room she occupied already warm. Had La.s.siter been entirely straightforward with her? Was there more to his own experiences since locating the film than he had shared with her? It was possible. His alcoholism had surely encouraged years of secrecy and addicts were good, weren't they, at hiding things.

She looked at the landline, mounted on the wall. She looked at the mobile sitting, slightly sweaty in the palm of the hand not occupied with her cigarette. She was aware that she was pacing the floor, as she had pretty much since the start of the day and her sustenance free breakfast of black coffee. She did not need sustenance. She had not really needed caffeine, even after a mostly sleepless night. Chemical stimulation had not been necessary at all. She was raw with alertness. Fear could do that. Dread could, too.

She had only sat, when she thought about it, to read the piece in the paper written by Lucy Church. The rest of the time she had spent standing and pacing and waiting and trying not to recollect.

It had been night time. The man had unlatched the door of his cottage and exited and she had seen that he still possessed the spare build of someone young. His cheeks were gaunt though, in moonlit shadow, and the hair on his head white and unkempt in the wind she thought probably always a feature of the place. He had worn no coat, as though the decision to leave or the summoning had been a sudden one.

He walked to the cliff edge. Hundreds of feet beneath where he stood, at the base of that granite rampart, she could hear the ocean in waves that boiled and foundered on the rock. Sea spray rose and gathered in droplets in his hair and beard as he braced himself against the withering gale. The sky was cloudless. Stars gaped in the blackness before him and gra.s.s in tussocks rippled around his naked feet. She could smell the Atlantic salt and shuddered with vertigo at the edge of an abyss of s.p.a.ce.

And she realised the man was not there alone. There was a presence, studying him, a dozen feet from where he stood. It was entirely still and she could make out no individual features. It was just a shape, a denser darkness than the night, more solid than the air, still and watching. And then it spoke. It recited words from a language unfamiliar to her ears. Its voice was deep and deliberate, a shudder of sound, not human at all. And the man at the cliff edge glanced across at where it came from and grinned back and winked conspiratorially and he stepped from the cliff edge into the void and slipped from sight with what seemed like a last, abject sigh of relief.

Alice wished that La.s.siter would call and she could get it over with. She knew some effective techniques for erasing bad memories from the conscious mind and they had always worked for her, however recent the memory concerned. As soon as she had spoken to La.s.siter she would employ the most effective of those techniques and banish forever from her mind the event touching the film can had encouraged her to see.

Lucy Church went to see Karl Cooper at his home in St John's Wood. The editor, Marsden, had ordered the profile written, very probably as the consequence of a command direct from McIntyre. The proprietor would probably have expected James Carrick to do the interviewing and writing personally. He was features editor, after all. It was rumoured that McIntyre and Cooper were friends and so it was not in the interest of the editor to be seen to be delegating important a.s.signments down the chain of command.

Perhaps James was just being characteristically lazy in pa.s.sing on the job to her. Or it could be a question of practicality. He did not do much actual writing and would be rusty; hardly ideal with so high-profile and sharp-minded an interview subject. On the other hand, her being given the a.s.signment could be construed as further evidence that she was excelling at her work and gaining further stature on the paper as the New Hope expedition and it's attendant hype gathered impetus.

She was glad to be doing the job. Cooper had long intrigued her. Of all the New Hope experts, the cosmologist had the highest public profile because of his television series ratings and the best-selling status of the books he had written. Of all of them, he was the one with the most legitimate claim to being a household name.

Other scholars had speculated about the possibility of alien tinkering with human history; of course. Structural enigmas from the pyramids in Egypt to the Roman catacombs had made it a tempting and profitable area of discussion for better than half a century.No one with Cooper's academic credentials had done it though and no one, until him, had done it with quite the compelling force of argument he had consistently demonstrated.

It did not hurt that he was so handsome a man. Even approaching 50, he remained as telegenic as he had been in his thirties. He still regularly topped magazine style polls. He was an impressive physical specimen with an air of authority, a natural charisma and a twinkle of sly humour in his pale blue gaze. They were the a.s.sets of an academic turned natural media success. His charms seemed not so much a.s.sumed as completely instinctive. Pus.h.i.+ng at the bell outside his front door, she wondered would he possess all or any of them in the flesh.

She had a moment to envy him the trappings of his success in the location and grandeur of the house he occupied. She knew that the dome of an observatory capped the building outside of which she stood. She hoped that her interview would be conducted there. Though she couldn't see it from where she stood, so substantial and imposing were the lower reaches of his home.

He opened the door himself. He flashed his celebrated smile. He did not treat her to a ritual of luvvie air kissing, though. Instead, he rather formally offered his hand and introduced himself before ushering her into his domain of speculation about the unsolved mysteries of the physical world.

Lucy made a mental note concerning the specifics of the handshake. It had been insistent but not bone-crus.h.i.+ng; the palm encountering hers smooth and dry but firm rather than soft. Such details were important to some of their female readers in a Mills and Boonish sort of way and she was only really comfortable recounting them if she could do so honestly.

There was a waft of aftershave. It smelled lemony and expensive. He was dressed in faded jeans and a chambray s.h.i.+rt and gray stubble glittered slightly on his unshaven jaw. She saw with relief that he was as tall as he was supposed to be; or a.s.sumed to be from the rangy way he strode around the ruins of places he claimed had been built with the a.s.sistance of technologies from far flung galaxies.

'Ms Church, or Lucy?'

'The latter.'

'Then please do call me Karl. Come in, Lucy. I'm delighted to make your acquaintance.'

He was light on his feet, lithe on the tread of the stairs. She a.s.sumed they were headed for the observatory. It was daylight and the dome would be redundant in the most important sense, but it was the spot from where he studied the heavens in what she further a.s.sumed was the wait for the moment when the alien visitors overcame their reserve and made formal contact with the inhabitants of earth. It was the intimate s.p.a.ce where his eye was given licence to roam through the gla.s.s of the dome to infinity. She smiled to herself. She'd have to remember to write that sentence down.

She'd caught the merest hint of a regional accent in the few words he'd spoken. It was not really discernable on television. But she knew from her research for this interview that he was originally from the town of Wigan in the north of England. His father had been a tool fitter. It had been a modest trade of sorts; the sort of occupation made obsolete during Britain's Thatcherite years. Unemployment and hards.h.i.+p had come to the Cooper family in the early 1980s, when his mother had taken cleaning jobs to enable Karl to go to university.

It was what you had to look for. The past informed the present. People were where they'd come from and how they'd grown up. She would get beyond the doctorate in cosmology, the PHD in astrophysics, the clutch of broadcast industry awards. She would get beneath the urbane extra-terrestrial television pundit. She would overcome the cliches and arrive at the man. It was her job and she was good at what she did.

They had arrived at the observatory. The dome was vast and the light so brilliantly generous it was as though the heavens poured it in. Cooper walked over to a glittering chrome refrigerator as tall as he was and pulled open the door. Chilled drinks were frosted at their necks with cold within.

'Regular or diet,' he said.

'Diet,' she said. She was still panting slightly with the steepness of the climb. She'd have to hit the gym a bit harder before New Hope Island. G.o.d forbid, she might have to lay off the smokes, too. 'I understand you're a friend of my boss?'

Cooper answered without turning around. He said, 'I've never met your paper's editor.'

'Not Marsden. I'm talking about my ultimate boss. I mean Alexander McIntyre.'

'No,' Cooper said. Now he did turn around. He'd pried the tops off the bottles and they were beading at their necks in the grip of his twin fists with condensation. He was grinning. 'I may have been in the same room as your proprietor, but I don't believe I have ever spoken to him in my life.'

La.s.siter left it until noon before calling Alice Lang. He considered himself a man curious by temperament. He did not think it was possible to be good at detection without possessing a strong degree of natural curiosity. So he wanted to call her, really, from the moment he awoke. But he decided to leave it out of consideration and tact until a time when she might have regained some sense of self possession.

She had blacked out. She had gripped the film can briefly in the fingers of her left hand and lifted its insubstantial alloy weight from the table and then her shoulders had sagged and her chin slumped onto her chest and he had in a snapshot of self-loathing been aware of what she would look like in middle-age.

He lifted her from the chair and placed her carefully on the floor. He put her into the recovery position and pinched her nose upwards and opened her mouth with gentle pressure to the sides of her jaw and was gratified, when he listened, to hear that she was breathing normally.

Her eyes started open. She saw him, kneeling on his thin carpet beside her. Her body juddered with remembered shock. 'Hold me,' she said.

And Patrick La.s.siter held Alice Lang as he had not held a woman for a decade or more. He held her tenderly and he stroked her cheek and shushed whatever silent noises gave rise to the current turmoil in her gifted mind.

Now, on the phone, almost 19 hours later, he coughed to clear his throat and said, 'Tell me, Alice. Tell me what it was you saw.'

She answered with a question. She said, 'What do you know about the death of David Shanks?'

'Not much,' La.s.siter said. 'He died in County Clare in the West of Ireland. I don't know the specifics. His body washed up on a remote beach, not far from the Cliffs of Moher. It was 42 years ago. He must have set out in his fis.h.i.+ng boat and then foundered in a squall. The Atlantic is an unforgiving ocean, violent and cold. The weather off Clare is unpredictable. It was not one of those whiskey and fiddle-playing Irish deaths. It was bleak, no music or laughter. All that I think can be said for certain is that he died as he largely lived, alone.'

'I know the specifics,' Alice said. 'You're wrong in one important regard. Yesterday afternoon, I saw his death. He didn't die alone, Patrick. Though I am fairly certain he would've wished he had.'

Chapter Three.

Napier waited by the makes.h.i.+ft harbour for the arrival of the choppers bringing the construction crew. They were a specialist outfit, experts at what they did. They were most often deployed building relief shelters and crisis headquarters all over the world in the aftermath of natural disasters such as earthquakes and catastrophic floods.

They would build the command centre from which the investigation into the New Hope vanis.h.i.+ng would be organised and run. They would build the media centre from which the world would receive its carefully rationed revelations. They would build the accommodation in which the team of disparate experts would shelter and sleep when they weren't on site.

They had, each and every man of them, been thoroughly vetted. They had all signed lengthy confidentiality agreements threatening punitive action if these were breached. They were probably being extremely well paid with a generous bonus if they completed their a.s.signed work ahead of schedule.

Even before their arrival, Napier envied them. He possessed a set of job skills that made him a misfit in civilian life. They, by contrast, were knowledgeable and respected professionals. He hoped they would also be better company that Captain b.o.l.l.o.c.ks and the Seasick Four.

At that moment, the former had deployed the latter on sentry duty, no doubt to impress the new arrivals with a show of vigilant authority. The captain himself was probably on the south of the Island in David Shanks' crofter's cottage. Strictly that was out of bounds, but the captain was the sort who enjoyed pulling rank and he spent more and more of his time there.

There was a window in the weather. It was not just mild, it was glorious. Generally you heard the heavy thrum of the choppers before they came into sight. That was particularly true of the Chinooks, with their twin rotors and the mighty turbines powering them. Today, though, he thought that he would see them before hearing the sound of their approach. Visibility seemed boundless, nature benign, the island positively Famous Five like in its picturesque appeal.

Despite this, Napier brooded. He brooded on his clay pipe find because the circ.u.mstances gave him no choice. He could not share the discovery with Blake. Captain b.o.l.l.o.c.ks was the status conscious sort. Whatever his own private opinion about New Hope's mysteries, the captain's public att.i.tude would be bound to be one of cynical disbelief.

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